I finished Bernard MacLaverty's slim volume of 11 short stories, Matters of Life and Death and came away awestruck. As the title implies, it's about how we live with death, despite of which there is nothing depressing about any of the stories in the book, and if anything, shows how humanistic MacLaverty is, right in line with Frank O'Connor and Chekhov in using simple language and showing what only needs to be seen. He never strives for meaning or entices with metaphor.

There's one haunting story that's really a novella called Up the Coast which recounts an episode in the life of a female artist whose desire to spend some time working alone on a remote Scottish coastline is painfully interrupted by a disturbed local, and the three page story, A Belfast Memory is worthy of Flannery O'Connor. But my favorite story was Visiting Takabuti that has an ending that reminded me of Salinger's A Perfect Day for Banafish. The beginning seems rather pedestrian but then slowly builds to an explosion. And in Takabuti the old Irish story is told of the soul that kissed the body where at the moment of death, "The soul leaves the body and tiptoes to the doorway, then turns and goes back to kiss the body that has sheltered it all these years."

Just a gorgeous little gem of a book